condition of the navy in the time of the Commonwealth in glowing colours, yet Mr. Oppenheim cites many occasions of well-founded complaints of the victuals.  He says:  ’The quality of the food supplied to the men and the honesty of the victualling agents both steadily deteriorated during the Commonwealth.’  Lord Howard’s principal difficulty was with the beer, which would go sour.  The beer was the most frequent subject of protest in the Commonwealth times.  Also, in 1759, Lord (then Sir Edward) Hawke reported:  ’Our daily employment is condemning the beer from Plymouth.’  The difficulty of brewing beer that would stand a sea voyage seemed to be insuperable.  The authorities, however, did not soon abandon attempts to get the right article.  Complaints continued to pour in; but they went on with their brewing till 1835, and then gave it up as hopeless.

[Footnote 72:  See ‘The Mariners of England before the Armada,’ by Mr. H. Halliday Sparling, in the EnglishIllustrated_Magazine_, July 1, 1891.]

One must have had personal experience of the change to enable one to recognise the advance that has been made in the art of preserving articles of food within the last half-century.  In the first Drury Lane pantomime that I can remember—­about a year before I went to sea—­a practical illustration of the quality of some of the food supplied to the navy was offered during the harlequinade by the clown, who satisfied his curiosity as to the contents of a large tin of ‘preserved meat’ by pulling out a dead cat.  On joining the service I soon learned that, owing to the badness of the ‘preserved’ food that had been supplied, the idea of issuing tinned meat had been abandoned.  It was not resumed till some years later.  It is often made a joke against naval officers of a certain age that, before eating a biscuit, they have a trick of rapping the table with it.  We contracted the habit as midshipmen when it was necessary to get rid of the weevils in the biscuit before it could be eaten, and a fairly long experience taught us that rapping the table with it was an effectual plan for expelling them.

There is no more justification for accusing Queen Elizabeth of failure to provide well-preserved food to her sailors than there is for accusing her of not having sent supplies to Plymouth by railway.  Steam transport and efficient food preservation were equally unknown in her reign and for long after.  It has been intimated above that, even had she wished to, she could not possibly have made any money out of bad provisions.  The victualling system did not permit of her doing so.  The austere republican virtue of the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of Elizabeth’s power.  In 1653, ’beer and other provisions “decayed and unfit for use” were licensed for export free of Customs.’  Mr. Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment that this was done ’perhaps in the hope that such stores would go to Holland,’ with whose people we were